The Brooklyn Rail

Not simply, as it is sometimes imagined—a case of cultural appropriation by colonizing powers—modernism was a two-way street, a phenomenon of mutual borrowing if not cross-pollination. This seems like a rather fraught statement—especially when one of the crowning achievements of West African art, the Benin Bronzes, which were looted as part of a punitive expedition in 1897, continue to be shown in the British Museum in the face of calls for repatriation by Nigerian authorities.

And yet, this is exactly the impression that one gathers from visiting Nigerian Modernism. The first survey of its kind in the United Kingdom, it reunites over 250 works by fifty artists and covers a fifty year period, from the first stirrings of decolonization in the 1940s up to the 1990s. As such, the exhibition dwells less on the traumatic, long-lasting effects of colonialism portrayed in works like Chinua Achebe’s 1958 classic, Things Fall Apart. Rather, it focuses on the ways modern art articulated a new creative idiom for a newly born nation after Nigeria’s independence in 1960.

After an initial gallery full to the brim with artworks showing how pioneers such as Aina Onabolu (b. 1882, d.1963) and Akinola Lasekan (b. 1916, d. 1972) steered Nigerian art in a new direction by combining European academic realism with Nigerian themes and folklore, the exhibition comes into its own in the room dedicated to Ben Enwonwu (b. 1917, d. 1994).

The first African modern artist to achieve international recognition, Enwonwu was a figure who straddled many worlds. As the son of a renowned Igbo sculptor, he never stopped using his father’s adze—an indigenous carving tool—as his primary means of expression. At the same time, thanks to a scholarship granted by the British authorities, he was able to attend Slade School of Fine Art in London. Another decisive influence was his encounter with Senegalese poet and founder of Négritude Léopold Sédar Senghor (b. 1906, d.2001), who, in 1956, confirmed to him the need to recuperate African cultural heritage as an instrument of anti-colonial struggle and decolonization.

And, indeed, the room—if not always uniform in quality—is almost mind-boggling for the breadth and variety of media and modes of creation deployed. Depictions of Harlequin-like masked dancers and religious festivals give way to stylized renditions of impossibly elongated female Black figures meant to celebrate African femininity. Exact, almost Rodin-esque bronze busts give way to more or less traditional or naturalistic wood-carved ones. A group of seven sculptures commissioned by the Daily Mirror in 1960 takes center stage in the room, while a few photographs toward the back provide documentation of Enwonwu sculpting Queen Elizabeth II in 1957.

After a gallery dedicated to potter Ladi Kwali (b. 1925, d. 1984), whose vessels married indigenous forms with European high-fired glazes and techniques, the show moves on to investigate those movements and artistic expressions that developed around or emerged from the experience of decolonization, attempting to carve out a new artistic language for the newly independent nation.

At the more intellectual, avant-garde end of the spectrum come the next two rooms, dedicated to the Zaria Art Society and the Mbari Artists and Writers Club. These organizations, sometimes in overlapping ways, give different accounts of the conscious effort to forge a new Pan-African identity, all the while trying to find a “natural synthesis” between European models and Indigenous art. Immediately following are galleries dedicated to the New Sacred Art Movement and the Oshogbo School—groups more interested in recuperating and celebrating the vernacular than directly serving the project of nation building.

It would be difficult to give an exhaustive account of the art gathered in these rooms, given the number and variety of works on display. To someone largely unfamiliar with African art, as I am, the works are difficult to parse out, especially because they are in such close dialogue with the local cultures and contexts of Nigeria.

At the same time, because echoes of Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, and modernists such as the Mexican muralists (a connection that perhaps the curator didn’t explore enough) are detectable in a sort of chicken-or-egg dynamic, they also feel oddly familiar. I think it is telling that two of the exhibition’s highlights—Jimo Bola Akolo’s (b. 1935, d. 2023) Fulani Horsemen (1962), depicting three nomadic horsemen, and an indigo-dyed batik tapestry, Mythos Odùduwà Schöpfungsgeschichte (1963), by Austrian painter-turned-Yoruba-high-priestess Susanne Wenger (b. 1915, d. 2009)—are manifestly steeped in local traditions and iconography, while at the same time feel like a Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres orientalist fantasy depicted by Kazimir Malevich and a revision of Picasso’s Guernica (1937), respectively.

For me, the exhibition could have stopped here, with perhaps a coda dedicated to the disillusionment that accompanied the Nigerian Civil War in 1967, which saw the starvation of millions in the secessionist Igbo region of Biafra. Not because what comes after isn’t interesting or accomplished, but because it dilutes a show that already would have benefited from more space to investigate “global” modernism as the expression of a historical conjuncture—that of decolonization and anti-imperialist struggle—almost unthinkable from our present vantage. Still, as a democratizing survey meant to raise interest in a lesser-known chapter of twentieth-century art, Nigerian Modernism is largely a success.